Davis Aurini’s not-version of Not The Sarkeesian Effect is out!

Woah! I wasn’t expecting this, but here it is. I have not yet watched it. But I imagine I will have some further thoughts when I do, because, holy crap, it’s Davis Aurini’s version of the Sarkeesian Effect!

Sorry, I mean, his version of a, no, wait, it’s not a version of anything, it’s his “separate independent work that should not be considered a ‘version’ of The Sarkeesian Effect or derivative of it,” as a title card in the “film” explains,

Even though it’s, you know, about Anita Sarkeesian and her “effect,” and even though it uses “footage originally filmed for use in The Sarkeesian Effect.”

That’s Aurini’s story and he’s sticking with it.

Anyway, I’m opening up a bag of popcorn and watching it. Join me, will you?

EDIT: Ok, I’m thirty seconds in and already tacky as hell graphics and badly recorded voiceover! This is gong to be good. By which I mean terrible.

EDIT 2: Ok, it’s not quite 4 minutes in and I’m getting bored. Damn. That’s what happened with that other totally unrelated film too.

Comments

Was listening patiently until I reached the section on how left-wingers are all envious, lazy losers who want to project their own neuroses onto good, hard-working people. This is not the reasoning of a serious political commentator.

Also, did that PhD student say feminists are ‘women who never graduated’? While the guy who is so obsessed with his alleged high IQ that he wrote a book about it says ‘these [feminists] went into academia because they are lazy and don’t want real jobs’?

mockingbird | March 29, 2016 at 2:34 pm
re: The Legion in NV: I’ve never had more fun wiping out a faction.
I waited until my female character leveled up a bit, walked in for a briefing, and massacred the lot of them.
“BE FREE, SLAVES! BE FREEEEE!”

I tried to do a Legion run just to see what they were like, since I’ve never done it or looked it up or anything.

I go through a lot of trouble to get to talk to Caesar, even having to uninstall a mod and restart my game because one of the mod’s new characters would attack the messenger on sight, and I couldn’t even use console commands to get them to stop fighting. And my sorry ass is stuck between an auto save inside The Tops and a save about a half-hour back.

So, I finally get to talk to the messenger, and I head out to the lake to hitch a ride to the Fort.

The head Legionare there says to me “I wasn’t expecting The Courier who has been giving us so much trouble to be a woman. Women belong at home, making strong boy babies.” (Or something to that effect.)

Yeah, (as an academic myself) the bit about academics being lazy got my goat too. I’m not even on a teaching contract yet (my contract is research only), but I nevertheless do do a little, and I end up pulling an all-nighter about once or twice a year to get teaching materials finished in time. (See for example about a month back when I worked 36 hours straight over the weekend, finishing in time to get 2 hours’ sleep on the second night before I had to go in to deliver my lecture.) I wouldn’t characterize that as “lazy”, particularly as there’s often something pre-existing that I could use if I did want to take the lazy route. I take the time to make my own slides (with animations and complicated graphs and stuff, that’s why it takes so long) because I want to, because I can then present the material in a way that I think maximises the students’ chances of understanding what I’m on about.

Ok, those long hours aren’t typical for me; most of the time I do a 35 hour week. And yes, that’s probably shorter hours than most graduate jobs, and yes, I definitely wouldn’t want to do a manual or service job (and greatly respect people who do), because that sounds pretty tough in other ways. I’m very fortunate that my job lets me be pretty flexible with my hours, that I can occasionally work at home, that I can usually take my days of leave when I want to, that no-one is constantly looking over my shoulder while I work, that I get to travel a few times a year to attend conferences, that my job is probably more respected than average, and that I really enjoy (most of) what I do. I would totally agree that I have it easier in my work life than many (perhaps most) people. I just don’t think 35 solid hours a week of challenging, useful stuff qualifies as “not a proper job” or means that I’ve “never worked”. (I also think that manual and service jobs should be paid more and be better respected, and that other graduate jobs should have shorter hours so as to offer a better work-life balance, rather than my job coming to meet either of those from the other direction.)

(I should also note that (a) that’s just me; I’ve been quite fortunate in keeping it down to the 35 hours it says on my contract as it’s not uncommon for academics to work 50 or 60 hours a week, and I may not be able to keep my hours as low as I progress away from my current relatively junior role and (b) I’m just talking about the job I’m paid to do when I say I do 35 hours a week; when I first started this position I hadn’t finished my PhD so had to spend the better part of a year doing 2 hours each evening and 5 hours a day at weekends to get that completed, and I’m currently supposed to be writing a couple of articles based on my PhD thesis in my own time, so as to be hirable when my current contract ends, though I’ll admit I haven’t done much towards that yet.)

The other thing that annoyed me was the way he was all “academics don’t live in the real world, they just spend all our public money doing useless theoretical stuff”, because it’s precisely because of people like him who don’t understand how science works that we currently have the impact agenda here in the UK, which I have so many problems with. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like my research to make a difference and improve people’s lives, it’s just that what we have at the moment is not the way to do it.

Tl;dr: I wanted to throw something at that guy. (And when I say “something”, just to be clear, I mean beanbags or plushies or something like that that wouldn’t do any actual physical damage.)

The film as a whole, though, was a thing of beauty and a joy forever. I can’t decide which was my favourite bit. Was it…

*when the middle Honey Badger spent a couple of minutes making what may possibly even have been an interesting point, but all you could get from it was her opening and closing her mouth because the volume was way down on that section?

*or when the same thing happened to Gail Dines with the added bonus that there was no caption or narration to even tell you who she was, so she was just a random inaudible lecturing woman to me with “Education” appearing three times over the top of her who for some reason popped up in the middle of the interview with the psychology student and sex worker (until I remembered one of the comments in this thread which explained who she was)?

*or the first time that the guy with the woolly hat at the picnic table appeared, when even though he was the interviewee he just got to nod along for a couple of minutes while the interviewer made some point or other?

*or the many graphics that were supposed to illustrate the point being made but were so densely packed with text and appeared so briefly that you couldn’t actually catch any of it (particularly since the narration didn’t pause at all but ploughed right on as you were trying to read)?

*or the graphic that appeared while we were told about what the Honey Badgers were all about before cutting to interview footage with them for the first time, which made them look like masked serial killers even as it was being explained that these were the good guys? (Seriously, that was kind of terrifying.)

*or (and to be fair I may have misunderstood this one) the bit where something along the lines of “If you don’t work you will die” popped up as a description of the state of affairs pre-twentieth century in what (I think?) was intended to say this was a bad thing, followed seconds later by the evils of socialist policies?

*or the bit where Lenin’s evil, evil communist policies were shown in a list which featured such entries as “free childcare” and “universal healthcare” and “sexual liberation”?

*or the bit right at the beginning where it looked like they couldn’t even hold the camera steady when there was no physical camera involved what with it being a digitally created title card (to be fair there was no camera-wobble thereafter, but I wasn’t to know that before I’d seen any of the rest of the film)?

*or the bit at the end where the narration thundered to what sounded (at least on a superficial, tone and phrasing level which was all I was engaging with by that point) like a strong and resounding conclusion, but then was followed by about ten minutes more of interviews and random Kipling poem?

No, ok, I can decide after all: it definitely has to be the bit where Paul Elam was all “Women like to claim they’re oppressed. That’s because there’s real benefit to being a victi- Erm, well, there’s definitely no benefit being a victim for straight white men, that is a 100% terrible thing for which they deserve nothing but sympathy. But for women, there’s a lot of benefit to being a victim.” You could just see the bit where his mind went “hang on, what do we do at A Voice for Men if not claim to be victims?” and initiated the backpedal. (I also liked the bit where he was saying that “it’s all about ideology, ideology and money; money is the most important but ideology isn’t far behind.” I mean, I know ostensibly he was talking about feminism…)

(Note: apologies that I can’t remember most of the names of the interviewees, that all of the quotes are paraphrases rather than direct quotes, and that intervals of time are my subjective impressions rather than actually measured, but I watched that thing once and I’m certainly not going back to spend any more time with it.)

Oh, and how could I forget the bit near the end where the aerospace engineer and porn actress was all “you know, actually most of the ‘harrassment’ Anita Sarkeesian received was just people critiquing her. Critiquing people isn’t even allowed any more!”? I guess critiquing people who critique games is a fundamental right, but critiquing games and critiquing people who critique people who critique games aren’t? What about critiquing people who critique people who critique people who critique games? Man, it’s hard to keep up!

(And that’s without even getting into the whole idea that rape threats and antisemitic caricatures and falsely reporting posts as spam or terrorism apparently somehow count as legitimate “critique” now.)

Oh by the way, in case anyone was wondering why Brad Wardell (who as the CEO of an actual developer seems out of place with the wannabes in the rest of the film) would get onboard the Aurini/Owens train, this is why:

On the topic of Fallout and Censorship: In the Japanese version of FO3, they disabled the option to blow up Megaton plus renamed the Fatman, but I guess because there wasn’t boobs or children being sexualized, there wasn’t a big stink about it that I remember.

@SFHC:
Yep, my thoughts exactly.
Whatever happened to his intention to leave anything Sarkeesian-related behind?
I mean, I get it: His game-reviews, music and literature are so terrible, not even gators care to click them to stick it to “teh Ass Jay Dubyas”.
I just don’t know if he wants to stay “relevant” in this way.

@Pandapool: The Fallout wiki certainly only names the Med-X revision, and explicitly calls it censorship. I don’t blame the Japanese for making those changes. We never had shadows burned onto our walls here in the States.

pandapool- idk why I found blowing up megaton to be so fun. Im a very nonviolent person IrL. it gets you a sweet pad but you lose really good trading & characters altho you can do the quests and steal stuff & recruit Jerico etc first and still do Maura’s quest. Its also a good way to go evil AF instantly. I do feel guilty for taking so much pleasure pretending to be evil. Maybe its a fascination with the nature of evil which I usually am hurt by and fight against? maybe Im messed up in the head? idk
sorry if Im rambling too much

@Falconer reeeally good point. Its shameful we in U.S. rarely recognize that as the horrifying & shameful war crime it was.
*wave of self loathing*
embarassed I didnt think of that b4 posting my comment

@Kale – Aw, thanks! Fraid I don’t blog, but I’ve been lurking here for a while now (greatly enjoying both the original posts and the comments) and I might comment more in the future (though hopefully in a less tl;dr fashion than my first two comments here!)

Falconer: It is really weird, but what made the biggest impact on me regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that shadow thing. Everything about the very idea scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Six-year old kid.

Not the absolute devastation and entire flattened cities.

Not the thought of a heatwave and pressure wave.

Not the horror of radiation and what it caused.

But the thought of shadows of formerly living people burning to whatever structures remained standing.

So I decided that this would be a frustrating excuse to procrastinate and had to pause it on his little intro screen. WHY is it bobbing around? You had to do that. WHY did you do that? And why are you looping a static sound effect that is like, a second long? That shit is annoying, don’t don that. If you’re trying to make this look like old timey film, at least through a film grain on there or something.

-Minus 10 skulls for the logo. Logos should be snappy, and easy to read. Why do you have an upside down L? OHHHHH both the L and the Y together are the symbols for Gamma. 9__6 Why wasn’t THAT your logo??

-I’m not an audiophile, but is that audio awful? Also, that is a terrible background image. But thank you for not taking a film grab of Anita Sarkeesian in the middle of an eye blink or something, that’s surprisingly not horrible of you.

-…. Wait, dominate and exploiting… WHAT THE FILM INDUSTRY? Ahahahaa No, this isn’t true. (Those links all went to women-specific things, but the same could be said for minorities, LGBTQ+, etc.)

-I also think that not just anyone could have taken her place, though he does have a bit of a point about her being in the ‘right place at the right time’. Specifically, starting a kickstarter that gamergaters found objectionable when they were little gator babbies. She would have not received the mainstream attention she did if she didn’t first receive all of that negative attention. And then continue to produce things, in spite of all people could do to stop her. (I couldn’t do it, thinking about the hate she goes through makes me want to curl up into a little ball.)

-“(…) it will help us see that phenomenon for what it truly is.” *screen fades to stupid purple squigglies* And I’m trying to figure out what these squigglies are supposed to represent, IE ‘what it truly is’. That is what the dissolve should be doing, right now. This is huuuurting me….

Okay I’m like a minute and a half in, I give up on writing comments. -_____-;

Edited to add: OMG wait isn’t this guy just a youtuber…? Does he have a sense of irony? Are his pants on fire??

1:58 – THAT CUT THOUGH – why did the music just cut
offffffffff

Used ‘considering’ twice in a sentence, fail.

-comparing how males are represented vs how females are represented… Argh. People want to BE Batman. They want to be awesome like that. People don’t want to be 9/10ths of the female characters, as ‘sexy’ as they are. They want to have sex with them. That is the purpose of female characters, and why the exaggerations (while both are still harmful and unrealistic) are not equivalent.

OMG OMG he IS using the Zelda games on the Philips CD-i as a rebuttal. NO. Those are not canon, most people haven’t played them, NO.

-OMG a woman designed Bayonetta! She’s a female fantasy! What is this guy’s day job? Has he never worked with clients?? Because, let me tell you, clients are going to get what they pay for. It might not be something you really want to work on, but it’s your job, so you try to do the best you can with it.

Also, isn’t there a lot of critique about the fashion industry and the unrealistic women it portrays?

(No. This is definitely the worst microphone. Please please please make one of these. It will help.)

OMG I’m so bored with watching 10 tiny thumbnails…. What is happening here? It’s awful. Are these Anita’s entire videos? That is not fair use, as I understand it.

9:30 – Someone had to model that, animate the women, play test it to make sure nothing breaks. Saying “It’s YOUR fault if you go in there and kill the women, drag them around, and stuff them in a trunk put there for you to interact with in this way” is a bad argument. If the game designers didn’t intend for you to be able to do it, they wouldn’t have put it in there. It takes up both money and space on the disc, which means it was intended.

Mass murder is not the nature of the game ENGINE, it’s the nature of the genre and the game itself. The game engine is *capable* of it, much like English is capable of being both beautiful and horrific. People decide what to do with it.

-She never said that the primary reason people enjoy video games is their hatred of women. She said these things she is talking about are there.

-I can’t even with this princess peach game. He doesn’t refute the claims of gendered stereotypes, he just says ‘LOOK a female lead! Why are you still complaining?? Isn’t this everything you’ve dreamed of?’

“Look! You got the vote! Why are you complaining that you’re expected to get married, have babies with no birth-control, and be a stay at home mom? SERIOUSLY it’s like you want equality or something.”

-Being a female =/= wearing pink and bows. I can’t tell you how much of my childhood was spent trying NOT to wear pink, because I hated it. So, so much. I guess all male characters should be wearing blue and a baseball cap, right? It’s a design choice! (ALL.)

-And on that note: NO. this whole ‘quick communication’ thing is not right. It’s LAZY. There are multiple ways to be female and show femininity which don’t include either the colour pink or a bow. Why can’t we do that? Oh, right, it’s because everyone is assumed to be male unless they are wearing pink. Or a dress. It’s kind of like how I really wanted my awesome Shepard to not wear that awful dress in the Kasumi mission in Mass Effect 2. It was not my cup of tea, and I got no choice in it. My Shepard would have rocked a tux, dude!Shep style.

-Pfffft shifting goal posts pffffft. The coherent critique is that we must critique things we enjoy, so they can get BETTER.

… I’m not even 10 minutes in and I think Aurini is trying to put his viewers into a coma… so boring. seriously, the whole thing with talking while thumbnails are playing in front of a screensaver… dude…

He basically says that Professor Skull didn’t have permission to use the footage shot for TSE in his film, and that lawyers were doing their thing now.
It was maybe two sentences, which he couldn’t commit to memory.

Funny side note: Someone commented on Encyclopedia Metallum (Owens band has an entry there), that “[The commenter had] it on good authority that the guitarist [Owen] takes it up the ass from a nazi!”
Can’t be bothered to find a link though, that site is nigh unusable.

Donate to the Mammoth!

We Hunted the Mammoth is an ad-free, reader-supported publication written and published by longtime journalist David Futrelle, who has been tracking, dissecting, and mocking the growing misogynistic backlash since 2010, exposing the hateful ideologies of Men’s Rights Activists, incels, alt-rightists and many others.

We depend on support from people like you. Please consider a donation or a monthly pledge by clicking below! there's no need for a PayPal account.

Send comments, questions, and tips for stories to me at dfutrelle@gmail.com, or by clicking here